We have spent a great deal of time on production application performance management (APM), but there is an entire market that focuses on pre-production performance testing. Our testing focused on production support teams, not development.

If you're running a Windows-based infrastructure with Active Directory, you might want to take a look at just-released Specops Suite 3.0. It can help with software deployment, inventory, license management, and scripting. You can focus on developing your policies and let the software take it from there. Specops seems to be moving in the right direction, consolidating many of the functions that individual software vendors provide today. By placing the capabilities in one neat package, administrators can focus more of their time on the critical policy definition and enforcement issues.

This week, Digital Fairway released Provergent Circuit Manager software as a service (SaaS) to manage telecommunication assets. If you're like most organizations, you use Excel to manage Wide Area Network (WAN), Voice, and Internet circuits. Often, different groups use different spreadsheets, so presenting an overall picture is impossible.

After an aggressive push into the application performance management market, Symantec has decided to sell its APM business to Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm. After the deal closes in March, the APM business will operate as a standalone company called Precise Software Solutions.

Last March we reviewed ScienceLogic in our Real World Labs and while we really liked the product, we pointed out a few areas of improvement. Their developers were listening! In version 5.1, ScienceLogic addressed our issues and also released a host of compelling features around VMWare management that may launch it to the top of the pack in consolidated Enterprise management products.

Most interesting in the release are a number of components to manage virtualized environments. Using Dynamic Applications built for VMWare, EM7 reports information on the VMWare ESX Server, hypervisor, and any Virtual Machines running a guest OS. This version also expands upon this foundation to provide better visualization of the entire virtualized environment and the relationships between virtualization infrastructure components. This includes auto alerts for individual virtual machine migration to composite graphs showing the health of multiple virtual machines.

ASG Software Solutions released Version 7 of its BSM-focused application portfolio management (APM) software ASG-becubic.

The architecture of the new version was redesigned for scalability, with the goal of processing higher volumes of data with added flexibility. It also includes integrated standard metrics and application views.

Will 2008 be the year that organizations finally conquer application performance management? In a few weeks we will be publishing our wrap-up from nine months of testing various application performance tools.

Performance management software vendor Nimsoft has gone a step further in the industry to increase the usability of monitoring the health of complex IT environments.

This fall, Microsoft announced that mainstream support for SQL Server 2000 will end in April 2008. What to do? While many administrators are upgrading to SQL Server 2005, process automation vendor Stratavia is trying to help out.

Many organizations are still looking to reduce operational expenses while increasing overall efficiency. Here are 10 ways that you may be able to cut IT operation costs in your organization.

InfoVista software, which is typically used for network performance management, is making a more significant move into application management. Last month, InfoVista purchased the small French software provider Accellent, who makes the 5View appliance.

Without a lot of fanfare, Symantec has been making substantial investments to compete with HP, BMC, CA, and IBM as a major player in enterprise management software. While Symantec may be best known for its antivirus software, it has been adding very compelling software offerings that will help it compete head to head with the other enterprise software vendors.

Opalis announced the release of Integration Server v5.4. New features described in the release include a new policy testing console, which validates IT process workflows prior to deployment. This will help to diagnose potential bottlenecks in the automation and is a great feature for run book automation software.

The 5.4 release also advertises deeper integration into an SOA environment, offering new XML processing capabilities that provide manipulation and transformation of content that is delivered from Web service-based SOA solutions.

Hewlett-Packard announced the release of Automated Operations 1.0, an integrated set of products that automates IT operations across technology and organizational domains.

Optinuity's new Oasis product takes a bit of a different approach to IT process automation. While many of the run book automation vendors focus on the integration of other platforms and automation of process, Oasis combines elements of IT automation, monitoring, and policy management into a single software solution.

Zenoss, which develops open source IT management software, released a new version of Zenoss Enterprise that added virtualization and SNMP v3 support. The new version adds several enterprise capabilities for network, server, and application management, including the discovery and monitoring of virtual servers and new application monitors. Also announced are new networking management capabilities, including predictive thresholds and support for SNMPv3.

While typically relegated to the world of telecommunication service providers, provisioning systems are becoming more common in large enterprise and government environments. These organizations have large, distributed telecommunication infrastructures and often need the ability to provision equipment quickly using a standard process framework.

If you have a network operations center, the folks at Entuity hope that you place them in the eye of the storm. Releasing Eye of the Storm (EYE) 2008, Entuity offers Fault Management, Inventory and Resource Management, Performance Management and Reporting in a single product suite.

For the past 10 years, an eternity in the software market, Managed Objects has been focused on delivering BSM, SLA, and CMDB solutions to its customers. Given its comparatively small size, its message may not be heard over enterprise software vendors such as CA, BMC, and HP.

Touting BSM implementations in 90 days or less, Managed Object says it can work with all of the other management vendors and collect data used in its analysis of the impacts that cause service outages.

I had the opportunity today to speak with Alan Ganek, vice president of Autonomic Computing and CTO of IBM Tivoli. IBM issued a press release covering a flurry of new Autonomic Computing features in their existing products.

Workstation and server-based security tools do little to protect against employees downloading data and storing it on laptops or USB drives that can be lost or stolen.

Federal regulations establish broad requirements that impact IT systems and infrastructures that many IT managers find difficult to translate into real world actions...but that excuse will not save you in court. Almost all IT organizations are impacted by these regulations and you need to understand which ones affect you and what you can do about it.

I had the opportunity to personally speak with Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC software following their earnings call today. There has been a lot of market attention around BSM and the competition in this space has really been heating up.

While a majority of organizations are looking toward BSM solutions in the near team, Beauchamp believes that "one of the primary barriers to implementation success will be cultural." Since BSM involves multiple business silos and technology groups, those organizations will need to find ways to bring those silos together culturally and technologically. Obviously, the tools they select and processes that they utilize are also key factors.

This summer, we published the results from our IT Process Automation testing where we looked at RealOps (purchased by BMC), iConclude (purchased by Opsware and then HP), and Opalis.

Recently we wrote about NetIQ's venture into this market with Aegis and Optinuity (who originally declined the request to participate in the testing) at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco a few months ago.

This market continued to be hyper-competitive as vendors grasp for market share and aggressively look to increase their customer base.

We came across another vendor in this area recently, Stratavia.

NetIQ introduced a compelling new IT process automation tool, called Aegis (pronounced e-gis). Unlike BMC and Hewlett-Packard, which went on shopping sprees to gobble up RealOps and Opsware/iConclude, respectively, this summer, NetIQ took the novel approach of developing the software from the ground up over the past 18 months. What's unique about Aegis is was designed to be a vendor-agnostic, or perhaps NetIQ-agnostic, software platform.

Don’t get too excited yet. The greatest development need is for NetIQ to release integrations into more applications. At launch, NetIQ Aegis' architecture only supports NetIQ AppManager. In development are five more adapters for third-party products such as Remedy, HP OpenView, EMC Smarts and other NetIQ technologies. NetIQ plans to release these over the next 1.5 quarters. We can't wait!

OPNET is working to bolster its application performance management solution and Monday announced the purchase of Network Physics for $10M. OPNET will add the NetSensory product line of Network Physics into their ACE Live end-to-end monitoring solution announced in September.

In my recent review of Tripwire, I was remiss in not mentioning Solidcore S3 Control. Solidcore S3 Control, like Tripwire, offers more control to change management. The software provides real-time visibility of changes being made across a variety of infrastructure elements, adds accountability to validate change activity and can also develop policies that can enforce change policy. Thanks to an avid InformationWeek reader (and Solidcore) for pointing this out to me. We hope to get the products in our labs soon.

I had the opportunity to speak with both Jim Grant and Cos Santullo, senior executives from BMC software, about BMC's business service management (BSM) strategy. BMC is deeply committed to promoting BSM and sees the success in BSM as an driver of BMC's success as a company.

HP announced that they enhanced their Business Service Management (BSM) solution and this will likely kickoff a battle of 'Who Has the Best BSM Solution' in the big enterprise management vendors.

Keeping an eye on an employee’s desktop is a touchy subject, and who hasn’t enjoyed a read of their favorite Network Computing blog in the middle of the workday?

Establishing enforceable policy on Windows desktops across an enterprise is a daunting task even in a fairly small environment. Manual policies such as a security checklist for configuring end user systems or servers require automation. Policies concerning application access, passwords, content accessibility and configuration, as well as server changes all should be managed in today's environment.

While BMC Software continues to focus on business service management, it has been quietly making a big push into the emerging service automation market. After purchasing RBA innovator RealOps this summer, this week BMC launched Service Automation, a set of solutions that automate the life cycle of IT-delivered business services, and also announced the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, a network compliance, change, and configuration management solution.

Established software vendor Opnet Technologies has taken an interesting approach to help organizations solve the vexing problems of application performance management. While nearly all of the big enterprise software vendors are trying to solve this problem by selling software, Opnet launched a service called STAR 24 (Special Team for Application Responsiveness). For a fixed fee, Opnet will dispatch consultants to a customer site within 24 hours of receiving the service order. If Opnet is unable to successfully identify the root cause of the problem, the full service fee is waived.

I had the opportunity to speak with Kieran Moynihan, former CTO of Vallent (acquired by IBM earlier this year) and current VP and CTO of telecoms for IBM Tivoli Software. We discussed the future vision for Vallent and performance management for communication service providers.

As we near the end of September, it's the end of the quarter for many software vendors. It's a great time to ask them to sharpen their pencils and make a deal if you're in the market for APO tools. With a lot of corporate consolidation, the spending spree for products has slowed. This has resulted in software salespeople working to meet aggressive numbers by the end of the quarter.

This year, there was a lot of action in the IT Process Automation space. It started when Opsware bought iConclude (now Process Automation System) and added the software to its network and application configuration software suite. Then BMC, buys RealOps – an iConclude competitor. BladeLogic goes public shortly after and the market responds by driving up the price on speculation that they too will be bought by one of the big players.

Testing application management applications prior to purchase is tough for many organizations. When many organizations look to purchase software tools to manage their application environment, they typically like to kick the tires of three to four vendors in their environment.

Welcome to the Application Performance Optimization Immersion Center. The goal of this site is to cover relevant information on effectively managing and automating applications and operations environments. We will conduct product reviews, evaluate new technologies that drive data center efficiencies, conduct interviews with leaders in data center operations and help you evaluate trends in the market.